Divergence a-3

by Tony Ballantyne

The picture on the screen jumped several times. Ivan was searching for something. A dark, distorted pyramid appeared on the screen, a tumbled mound of earth. The picture rewound quickly, stopped, gained clarity, and Eva realized what she was looking at. She gasped, placed one hand to her mouth.

  “That’s Stephen,” she whispered. The dark pyramid was revealed to be Stephen Kerry slumped in his wheelchair, drool running from one corner of his mouth to soak the sleeve of his black jacket. “He lives on the floor just below.”

  Silver and grey and rust-colored VNMs could be seen gathering around the wheels of Stephen’s chair. They were looking up at him. Stephen was staring back in horror. In the background of the image, orange shapes shuffled ever onwards to the next pylon.

  “How did he get down there?” asked Eva.

  “There are shafts hidden throughout this whole building,” said Ivan. “This building itself is an outpost of the world below. Every night, the handicapped are carried down to live in the world below.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Who can second-guess the Watcher?”

  “So it is the Watcher doing this!”

  “I don’t know for sure! But who else?”

  “But why ?”

  “I can only guess. But I have often wondered. What if a handicapped person was raised in a world of the handicapped? Would he be normal?”

  “Normal? What do you mean by normal?”

  Ivan laid his hand on her forehead.

  “You’re burning up. I think you have had too much to drink, Eva.”

  Eva felt the coolness of his hand. She was having trouble speaking without slurring. Slowly she formed a sentence: “I think you’re right, Ivan. I think we should go outside.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I’m sorry. After you went to all this trouble preparing the meal.”

  “No trouble.”

  “It was delicious. But I feel sick. Too much cream in my coffee.”

  “Drink some pepper vodka.”

  “No. That will curdle it. Let’s go outside. Take a walk.”

  She took one last look at the screen, doing her best not to think about what she had witnessed there. Ivan took her hand and led her to the door.

  Eva looked up through the tunnels in the clouds to the darkening sky above.

  “Do you feel better?” asked Ivan.

  “Every time we look up, it is the opening or closing parenthesis on a recursive block,” declared Eva, swaying.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Look up there. Clouds rising higher and higher like a stack of pennies thrown into the sky, and beyond them the first stars are appearing. Up there I see the contrails of the airplanes from the outside world. The Watcher is closing in on us, Ivan. The Free States won’t last much longer.”

  “So come with me when I return home.”

  “No. While I stay here I am safe.”

  “Safe here? With what you have seen lies beneath your feet?”

  Eva swayed a little. How far down, she wondered? How far down to those caves?

  If they were real, of course. No—she shunted the treacherous thought to one side—Ivan wouldn’t lie to her. Would he?

  They heard the chatter of approaching voices. Five people in wheelchairs approached, two of them being pushed by others. She studied them carefully. Stephen Kerry was not amongst them. What would she have done if he were?

  “Hello, Eva. Hello, Ivan.”

  Eva held on to Ivan as she greeted the newcomers in return. She still felt sick and dizzy, and she felt the stiffness in his body as she clung and realized why when she saw who was walking behind the party. The priest, the man who annoyed Ivan so.

  “Hello, Pobyedov,” she called. “Say hello, Ivan,” she muttered.

  One of the young men in the wheelchairs began to laugh. “Here we go again,” he called. “Listen, we’re out for an evening stroll. We don’t want to hear you two arguing!”

  “I wasn’t going to argue,” said Ivan.

  “Nor was I, Wilson,” said Pobyedov. He knelt down by the young man in the wheelchair and offered him a drink from a little silver hip flask. Wilson took a nip, gave a satisfied gasp, and then offered the flask to Eva and Ivan.

  “No, thank you,” said Eva. “I’ve had enough.” She squeezed Ivan’s arm, urging him to be polite and accept the offered drink. Reluctantly he did so.

  “Whisky,” he said. “But why is it sweet? This is like a child’s drink, Wilson.”

  Wilson laughed again. He was a big man, with strong arms and a broad chest. Only his legs were thin and useless.

  “It is, it is!” he said delightedly. “Which fool thought of putting vanilla in whisky? And yet you drink black currant vodka and are happy, Ivan. Pobyedov, I like this stuff!”

  There was a gentle thumping sound. One of the group had started to spasm, one arm beating regularly against her head. Long strands of drool ran down onto her chest. Her father leaned down and spoke to her softly.

  “We’re going to go inside now,” said Wilson, pretending not to notice the woman’s behavior. “We thought we might go to Manny’s bar later on. Maybe see you there?”

  “Maybe,” said Eva.

  They pushed their chairs on down the uneven concrete slabs of the road. Pobyedov stayed with them, and Eva wished that he hadn’t. Not tonight of all nights. She felt too nauseated for an argument.

  “I hear you are going back home in two days,” said Pobyedov.

  “I am,” said Ivan.

  “I am grateful to you for coming here,” said Pobyedov. “You’ve made a big difference to the residents. The heating would not be working but for you and Alexandr.”

  “Maybe,” said Ivan, and Eva saw his face flushing red. She knew that he was trying to be polite. He honestly believed that the handicapped would be better served back out in the Watcher’s world. It was taking a great effort for him not to point this out. He changed the subject by enlisting an unlikely ally.

  “I have asked Eva to leave with me, Pobyedov. What do you think?”

  “I think Eva must follow her own heart, Ivan Atchmianov. What do you think about our Narkomfin, Eva?”

  “I don’t know,” Eva said, still lost in the strangeness of the evening. “It’s unusual. I wonder about it, sometimes. We have artificial intelligences that think for us and they build machines that can reproduce. We are producing thoughts and artifacts that are beyond human capabilities, and yet we still have the handicapped. Even amongst the machines. Even some VNMs do not reproduce truly. They are born deformed.”

  “They are not born, Eva,” Pobyedov said.

  “You know what she means,” said Ivan, who normally would not agree with Eva’s choice of words either.

  “I suppose I do,” Pobyedov said. “But what is your point, Eva?”

  Eva was staring after the retreating group of people, outlined in silhouette now in the darkening evening, moving on down the V of the concrete path towards the painted Narkomfin.

  “I don’t know,” Eva said. “It is almost as if the existence of the handicapped was written into the laws of the universe itself.”

  Ivan made a dismissive noise. “Nonsense.”

  “Someone seems to think so,” she muttered.

  “No, it is just a fault in the replication process. Don’t smile at me like that, Pobyedov. I don’t want another argument.”

  “You argue with yourself most of the time, Ivan Atchmianov.”

  Eva let go of Ivan. It was her fault, she knew it. She had started this argument.

  “How about if I built a handicapped robot?” Ivan asked, flushing red. “What if I made a machine and deliberately disabled its legs—like Wilson. Left it to push itself around in a chair? Why don’t I do that?”

  Pobyedov smiled.

  “You would not do that, Ivan Atchmianov, because God gave you a heart that tells you what is right and what is wrong.”

  “Pah, there is no God! Everything you see is just a result of the fact tha
t matter attracts matter.”

  “Who made the matter?”

  “Who made life?” retorted Ivan. “I tell you, no one. Simple chance. Matter attracts and forms molecules. By chance some of those molecules will be capable of replicating themselves. From this, you have life.”

  “I do not dispute this, Ivan Atchmianov. But it does not prove that God did not teach you how to love.”

  Eva interrupted. “Come on, Ivan, take me back inside.”

  Ivan clenched her hand in his fist. It almost hurt, such was his temper.

  “Listen, not thirty kilometers from here we saw a flower formed of metal. It was growing: a metal flower. Life!”

  Pobyedov smiled. “There are many wondrous things in this creation…”

  “But it was not life. It was just bad programming.”

  “And who wrote the program that brought us here, Ivan Atchmianov?”

  “Simple chance, Pobyedov. Cells form that can follow simple rules, but given enough cells and enough time and they form ordered patterns, and then thought emerges. This is inevitable. This is part of the universe. Tell him, Eva, tell him about the barge. Tell him about how they had to sleep on the barge in the old days.”

  “Don’t get me involved.”

  “Eva speaks of the competitive urge: how evolution causes animals to fight for resources.”

  “What about love?”

  “Love? Pah! This too has been modeled. Simulations have been run.” Ivan waved his hand dismissively.

  “Sometimes it is appropriate for members of a species to aid each other. Love is the name given to this bond. It is an evolved thing, nothing more.”

  “Ah,” said the priest, “I see. So, you are saying that love is just as inevitable as thought and life and self-replicating molecules and stars. So then you agree with me, that love is written into the universe at a fundamental level.”

  And at that the priest took another sip from his flask. He offered it once more.

  “Now, another drink,” he said, “and then shall we walk back to the building?”

  Pobyedov, called Judy in her sleep. Through Eva’s eyes she watched him walking beside them in the gathering gloom. She raised her voice and shouted again: Speak to me, Pobyedov! Who are you? I can feel you through the meta-intelligence. Who are you?

  She was lying in her bed, lying under black sheets, dreaming in her room that was like a great bell that echoed with the sounds that reverberated through the ship. Echoed with the thoughts of the crew of the ship. She was picking up on the thoughts of the others. Pobyedov? He was part of the FE software, she realized. Part of it. An echo from the past. From the very core of its being.

  Pobyedov was in its bones, one might say.

  maurice 4: 2252

  They had both been drunk and they had both done something stupid, but in the grand scheme of things that was hardly something of note. Maurice had started it by unfolding his console, but it was Saskia who drunkenly raised the question. They had entered into a Fair Exchange, and both had been outwardly satisfied with the outcome, and inwardly put out at its equality. Both had thought themselves a more attractive proposition than the other. As is so often the case in life, it turned out that they were not.

  Saskia’s hair spread out on the white pillow. She was smiling at him.

  “Thank you,” she said. “If I turn around will you hold me?”

  “Of course,” said Maurice, and she rolled over and shuffled against him so that her pale back and thin buttocks were pressed against his thighs. He placed his hand on her flat stomach and remembered the shadows of her ribs, remembered feeling the dark buds of her tiny breasts beneath his thumbs. Truth be told, he hadn’t fancied her that much, but nonetheless he felt an enormous sense of release and relaxation lying there. They had both felt it. Saskia had given an enormous shudder as she had climaxed, and Maurice had felt the tension ebbing from her body immediately afterwards. Judy had been right.

  “Judy was wrong,” murmured Saskia.

  “What do you mean?” yawned Maurice, already drifting off to sleep.

  “She told me to keep away from you,” she confided. “Said that you were only after one thing. She didn’t seem to realize that was what I needed, too.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “I suppose, being a virgin, she wouldn’t understand.”

  Maurice was already drifting in a snugly warm world. Of course she understands, he thought. She manipulated you as deftly as her kind always does. The best way of getting you to do anything, Saskia, is by telling you to do the opposite.

  “You realize this is just about companionship, don’t you?” whispered Saskia.

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Are you sure? You just went all tense.”

  “I was thinking about something else,” said Maurice. He was suddenly wide awake, his mind bubbling over. Judy had manipulated them, hadn’t she? And, he realized, it wasn’t for the first time.

  “I wonder what she will do for Edward,” Saskia thought aloud.

  “I wonder what she will do for herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I don’t know, thought Maurice. Was that ethical? Tricking us into bed together? Are Social Care allowed to do that? I never thought of that before. What else has she done while she’s been playing with our emotions?

  “She has dreams, you know,” murmured Saskia. “Haven’t you seen her in the mornings? How pale she looks?”

  That time in the hold, when I played my clarinet.

  “She always looks pale, of course,” Saskia continued, and for no real reason she started to laugh.

  When she was asleep, Saskia looked like a little girl. She was smiling, one hand tucked beneath her head, her knees tucked up almost to her chest. Maurice got out of bed before shaking her gently awake. She opened her eyes and smiled, and then remembered where she was. A shutter seemed to come down inside her head and she sat up suddenly, wrapping the thin white sheet around herself.

  “Good morning.” Maurice handed her his thick white robe. “I’m going to take a shower.”

  Saskia let her hair drop over her eyes.

  “Good morning,” she said. “I think I’ll do the same back in my room. I’ll see you at breakfast?”

  “Okay.”

  Maurice went into his bathroom and stepped behind the smoked-glass screen of the shower cubicle. Mist rose and was sucked up by the extractor above. As he rubbed himself down with grapefruit cleansing gel, he felt his body tingling to life. Stepping from the shower into the clean black-and-white tiled room beyond, he felt fresh and rested. He dried himself with a thick white towel, a scribble of black decorating the border, and then shaved, feeling alive and ready for anything. This was what Social Care was good at, he reflected. Manipulating people to do what was right for them. That’s what the Watcher was supposed to do; that’s what it had set out to do, anyway.

  Then he recalled his thoughts on falling asleep last night. What else was Social Care good at? What was Judy playing at?

  He was just wondering about this when the message sounded from his console. Eva Rye, this is a warning. You are approaching a quarantined zone. Please alter your course at your earliest convenience. Do not approach Earth.

  Judy was waiting for them all in the conference room, her arms folded. Saskia followed Maurice into the room. Her business suit was gone; in its place she wore a white blouse and a pair of blue jeans that hung loosely from her narrow hips. Little teardrops of silver hung from her ears. She smiled politely at Maurice and sat down at the thick glass table in the seat opposite to him, next to Miss Rose. The old woman sat up stiffly, her skin still bearing the slightly fluorescent bloom of the autodoc. She looked healthy, but her eyes held a slightly glazed look, the effect of the memory-repressing drugs she was being fed. Maurice looked away from her. The drugs were the only thing between her and the horrific memory of those creatures forcing their way into her body and plumbing themselves directly into her nervous system. Maurice felt nauseated at
very thought.

  Edward sat next to Judy, staring up at her. He could see it, too, Maurice realized; he felt Judy’s fatigue. Not physical, but mental fatigue at holding a mind twisted into one shape for so long. She was ready to snap. Nonetheless, when she spoke, her voice was as calm as ever.

  “We’re approaching Earth,” she said. “You probably heard the message.”

  “Who was that speaking?” asked Saskia. Maurice was surprised to note that she was holding Miss Rose’s hand.

  “The Watcher,” said Judy. “Or one of his mouthpieces. It’s not safe to go to Earth. The Dark Plants are all through the system. The Watcher doesn’t like anyone going in or coming out.

  “But we’re going in?” said Edward.

  “Only if you decide it, Edward,” said Judy. “You’re in charge now.”

  Edward turned to Saskia, his face twisted with worry.

  “Judy is correct,” said Saskia. “You’re in charge now. You must do whatever you think is right, Edward.”

  Edward frowned. What was he thinking about right now? How does his mind work, and why is it so much slower than mine?

  “We made a deal,” Edward said eventually. “We have to take Judy to Earth.”

  “No, you don’t,” Judy said. “The Eva Rye has to take me to Earth. You can all board the Bailero and go somewhere else.”

  “No way, Judy.”

  The voice came from a silver spider sitting on the table. Maurice realized that it had been there all along.

  “I don’t recall inviting you to our meeting, Kevin,” Judy said easily.

  “I’m a member of this crew now,” said the spider.

  “Actually, you’re part of the cargo, Kevin,” she replied. If Maurice hadn’t known better, he would have said that Judy was smirking. “You were traded to this ship as part of a Fair Exchange conducted by the Free Enterprise .”

  “So I was. And if you take the Eva Rye and leave me behind, I will judge the trade to be over. I will revert to being a free agent. Anybody left on board my ship will then become my property. I suggest you take your crew with you, Judy.”

  “They’re not my crew, they’re Edward’s.”

  “You can all do what you like,” Edward said.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” Saskia said. “We’re all coming with you, Judy. We’re not staying behind with that mad fucker.” She pointed to the silver spider on the table. Judy spoke matter-of-factly. “If Kevin is going to be a problem, we will just wipe him from the processing space.”